WASHINGTON: On their small but fabulously rich island in the Persian Gulf, the Bahraini royals stand out among Arab leaders for the artfulness of their response to demands for change in a region in which change does not come easy.
Think …
If Tunisia's Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali had had the gumption to stare down the protesters, then Egypt's Hosni Mubarak would not have been the pushover that he was. And if Libya's Muammar Gaddafi had set up a committee of inquiry instead of raining crude epithets on the people of Benghazi, then Syria's Bashar al-Assad would not have his back to the wall and Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh might not be down for the count.
Instead, the Bahrainis remain in their gilded palaces. In a region in which winners take all, the response of the Manama princes to the Bahraini uprising has been a display of altruism not previously seen in the Arab world. A report commissioned by the government acknowledged there had been ''torture'' and excessive force deployed against mainly Shiite protesters in Pearl Square.
Or it is a subterfuge, a cynical mea culpa that they present as a process of reconciliation while their backers in Washington and London wipe sweat from their brows at another disaster averted?
Go back to early this year and the point at which each regime had to make a call on what to do in the face of popular uprisings. From Ben Ali to Assad - Arab rulers got flustered or angry, lashing out violently and digging in for a fight. The Bahrain response was just as brutal but it was brief and, just as importantly, it took place against the backdrop of more intense tumult in the region.
What set Bahrain, the home of the US Navy's Fifth Fleet, apart was its quite brilliant resort to the wiles of Western democracy.
First there had to be a dialogue between regime and protesters, because that is the civilised thing to do after you have harassed, tortured and murdered your opponents. Then came a catchily named creation that might have come from one of Washington's K Street lobbyists - BICI, or the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry.
Like all the ideas that sounded good in a dialogue that went nowhere, so too will the recommendations of this week's 500-page BICI report. But the dialogue and the commission of inquiry allowed the princes to recover their balance and for the West to nod sage-like at this outburst of Arab civility.
Will the BICI recommendations be adopted? Hardly. More likely there will be more of the welcoming lip-service we heard this week and then referral to committees and the appointment of working groups.
That is why there is no rush in Bahrain to release protesters from prison or to reinstate those who were sacked from their government jobs for having the temerity to protest peacefully.
The problem in Bahrain is the same as the problem in the rest of the region - people want their rights and, as in Syria, a religious majority refuses to be lorded over by a religious minority.
All this explains why the Middle East freedom glass is more half-empty than it is half-full.
Yes, elections will be held in Egypt next week, but there is deep concern among analysts that the rules have been rigged to protect the interests of the generals and the old establishment; yes, Gaddafi is gone, but we can only hold our breath as Libyans go about settling their differences; and it is too early to make a call on what happens next in Yemen after this week's decision by Saleh to relinquish power.
In all this the West has meddled - by its intervention as much as by its refusal to intervene; by its sanctions as much as by its silence. Gaddafi's death has switched the focus to Syria, where some analysts read the Western and regional response as a stirring of the Damascus pot with a view to settling American and Saudi scores with Iran.
Arguing that an international effort to unseat Assad seemed to be failing, Alastair Crooke wrote recently in The Guardian: "Most people in the region believe that if Syria is pushed further into civil conflict, the result will be sectarian violence in Lebanon, Iraq and more widely too."
A former British intelligence agent who now runs a Beirut think-tank, Crooke said: "The notion that such conflict will throw up a stable … democracy is fanciful at best, and an act of supreme callousness at worst.''
